The foundation of social media is conversations. As a B2B marketer you should look towards social media – in particular communities – as an opportunity to create dialogue between your organisation and customers.
Marketing is, after all, about understanding and satisfying customer wants and needs. What better way to do this than to provide your customers with a community where like-minded individuals can come together and interact with both the company and each other?
Great organisations such as Dell, Oracle and IBM already use communities as a channel to communicate with their customers on equal terms, and at the same time provide a collaborative workspace where they can provide feedback and assist in the development of future products and services.
Where to start
I’m certainly don’t advise following the tired formula of ‘build it and they will come’. As with any plan, you need to define your business objectives by determining if you want to:
- Co-create future products/services with your customers.
- Build stronger relationships or identify current trends.
- Understand how your products or services are used.
Determine funding
Look at resources and what investment you can realistically dedicate to the community, as time and effort play a large part in its success.
The cost to develop a community can be minimal and can be launched immediately for free, using tools such as Facebook brand pages or groups.
So, if budgets are tight or you do not have time to wait for them to be signed off for a bespoke interface, you can start building your community immediately.
Create a stir
Having identified your objectives and platform you then need to target your key influencers. The customers willing to participate in a community will usually be those that provide regular feedback via email or surveys, or have an active presence on blogs. Furthermore, these key influencers will help you to build the community through dialogue with other members.
Contact the key influencers via email, informing them about your new community and invite them to join first. Seed content such as company information into the community to kick-start the conversation and educate the key influencers on how the dialogue should take shape. When the community starts to buzz, use your CRM email database to inform all your customers about the community and invite them to participate in the discussion.
Promote, promote, promote
Once the conversation is taking shape you still need to maintain the momentum. To do this you can run promotions or competitions amongst the community. Set up a tiered system whereby members are ranked or rewarded based upon their contribution to the community. Make the recognitions public to encourage other members to follow suit.
If you gather real insight into emerging trends within your industry via the community, why not write a report and issue a press release to raise awareness of the community’s value?
Through effective digital PR you can boost community activity whilst simultaneously recruiting new members.
Integrate other business units
Your community should shape what your business will eventually become – open, honest and highly effective.
More importantly it should be integrated with not just marketing but other strategic business units, for example: customer service/support, product development and finance, this is because all units can benefit from the knowledge, insight and collaboration of the community as they are all brand touch points.
Fundamentally, history shows us that those businesses that go on to succeed and reap the benefits are authentic.
If you provide a platform where customers can share values with your company, have meaningful conversations with different business units and interact with other community members, then they are more likely to stay loyal to a brand. We’re all well aware that it costs twice as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer.
A community-based approach can help lower costs at the outset but when budgets are tight they may increase rewards when (if) success blossoms.
Related articles
SOCIAL MEDIA: Marketing in the Twitter stream – 02-03-2009
Or use our enhanced search functionality to find other related articles
